A farming landscape can be co-managed for both produce safety and nature conservation. Promising practices include: (1) planting low-risk crops between leafy-green vegetables and pathogen sources, such as grazeable lands, (2) buffering farm fields with non-crop vegetation to filter pathogens from runoff (3) fencing upstream waterways from cattle and wildlife (4) attracting livestock away from upstream waterways with water troughs, supplement and feed (5) vaccinating cattle against foodborne pathogens (6) creating secondary treatment wetlands near feedlots and high-intensity grazing operations (7) reducing agro-chemical applications to bolster bacteria that depredate and compete with E. coli (8) exposing compost heaps to high temperatures through regular turning to enhance soil fertility without compromising food safety, and (9) maintaining diverse wildlife communities with fewer competent disease hosts.
An Agro ecological, Systems-based Alternative to Modern Industrial Agriculture
What Are Diversified Farming Systems?
Diversified farming systems are a set of methods and tools developed to produce food sustainably by leveraging ecological diversity at plot, field, and landscape scales. Around the world, DFS depend on diverse cultures, practices, and governance structures to support these locally-adapted management systems. By supporting a complex fabric of natural and human ecologies, DFS allow critical ecosystem services – like pollination and pest control – to be generated and regenerated within the agroecosystem, aided by the human knowledge to sustain those processes.
While there is no single template for “DFS,” they share a common focus on local production, agro-ecological and local knowledge, and whole systems approaches to agriculture, based on promoting ecological diversity and ecosystem services from field to landscape scales.
For example, in the crop field, polycultures (multiple crops and/or varieties) and integration of fish or livestock permit more efficient use of nutrients. Around the field, hedgerows or live fences provide habitat for beneficial insects that control pests and provide pollination. In the surrounding landscape, wild or partly-wild patches of pasture, meadow, woodlots, forests, marshes, streams, and lakes support livestock and wildlife, provide flood control and forest products, and improve water quality.
Diversified farming systems and agroecological approaches can support smallholder livelihoods and reduce hunger and poverty in both rural and urban communities. Diversified agriculture is critical to feed the world population reliably and in perpetuity while mitigating climate change and avoiding a collapse of the ecological systems on which human survival depends. The ultimate goal of the new DFS center, as a research hub at UC Berkeley for studying this multi-scale, systems-based agriculture, is to help create a resilient, socially just, and secure global food system.
